Maternal Mortality Quotes

People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anaesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love. This idea of “maternal love” is spreading like religious dogma. Accept Maternal Love as your Lord and Savior, for the Kingdom is near!

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

Dr. Semmelweis held several sequential staff positions, and wherever his hygiene method was followed, maternal mortality rates dropped. But most of his contemporaries ignored such outrageous and offensive “nonsense.

The death rate for that is 8.8 women per 100,000.12 As I’ve mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman. (And getting more so, because the maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.)

every mother deserves reproductive justice. How a society treats pregnant women is a metaphor for how a society raises its children. Every year, about seven hundred American women die from pregnancy, the highest maternal mortality rate among rich countries in the world. Two-thirds of the annual deaths from pregnancy are considered preventable.

People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love.

But delivery has to do with the safety of two lives. Jiyoung chose to give birth in a hospital with the help of experts because she had decided it was the safer way, and believed the birthing plan was a decision based on the parents’ values and circumstances, not something to make a value judgment on. However, a significant number of media outlets reported on the possible adverse effects of medical treatment and medication on newborns—their causal relationship speculative—to arouse guilt and fear. People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anaesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love. This idea of “maternal love” is spreading like religious dogma. Accept Maternal Love as your Lord and Savior, for the Kingdom is near!

In June 1994, Ross was among twelve Black feminist activists attending a pro-choice conference in Chicago who felt that the healthcare agenda presented by representatives from the Clinton administration was too concerned with avoiding Republican opposition and did not adequately address concerns of Black women around sexual and reproductive autonomy. These issues included maternal mortality, evidence-based sex education, and whether women could afford abortions or preventative reproductive healthcare.

There’s overwhelming evidence about what happens when these rights are denied. Texas has defunded Planned Parenthood and refused to expand Medicaid, and maternal mortality doubled between 2010 and 2014. That’s the worst in the nation, and it’s higher than the rate in many developing countries. Six hundred women have died in Texas—not from abortions, but from trying to give birth. The number of Texas teenagers having abortions actually increased when support for family planning was cut. In one county, Gregg, it went up 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.

My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.

of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.

However, a significant number of media outlets reported on the possible adverse effects of medical treatment and medication on newborns—their causal relationship speculative—to arouse guilt and fear. People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anaesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love. This idea of “maternal love” is spreading like religious dogma. Accept Maternal Love as your Lord and Savior, for the Kingdom is near!

For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts.

Homer's Hymn to Venus Published by Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862; dated 1818. Verses 1-55, with some omissions. Muse, sing the deeds of golden Aphrodite, Who wakens with her smile the lulled delight Of sweet desire, taming the eternal kings Of Heaven, and men, and all the living things That fleet along the air, or whom the sea, Or earth, with her maternal ministry, Nourish innumerable, thy delight All seek ... O crowned Aphrodite! Three spirits canst thou not deceive or quell:— Minerva, child of Jove, who loves too well Fierce war and mingling combat, and the fame Of glorious deeds, to heed thy gentle flame. Diana ... golden-shafted queen, Is tamed not by thy smiles; the shadows green Of the wild woods, the bow, the... And piercing cries amid the swift pursuit Of beasts among waste mountains,—such delight Is hers, and men who know and do the right. Nor Saturn's first-born daughter, Vesta chaste, Whom Neptune and Apollo wooed the last, Such was the will of aegis-bearing Jove; But sternly she refused the ills of Love, And by her mighty Father's head she swore An oath not unperformed, that evermore A virgin she would live mid deities Divine: her father, for such gentle ties Renounced, gave glorious gifts—thus in his hall She sits and feeds luxuriously. O'er all In every fane, her honours first arise From men—the eldest of Divinities. These spirits she persuades not, nor deceives, But none beside escape, so well she weaves Her unseen toils; nor mortal men, nor gods Who live secure in their unseen abodes. She won the soul of him whose fierce delight Is thunder—first in glory and in might. And, as she willed, his mighty mind deceiving, With mortal limbs his deathless limbs inweaving, Concealed him from his spouse and sister fair, Whom to wise Saturn ancient Rhea bare. but in return, In Venus Jove did soft desire awaken, That by her own enchantments overtaken, She might, no more from human union free, Burn for a nursling of mortality. For once amid the assembled Deities, The laughter-loving Venus from her eyes Shot forth the light of a soft starlight smile, And boasting said, that she, secure the while, Could bring at Will to the assembled Gods The mortal tenants of earth's dark abodes, And mortal offspring from a deathless stem She could produce in scorn and spite of them. Therefore he poured desire into her breast Of young Anchises, Feeding his herds among the mossy fountains Of the wide Ida's many-folded mountains,— Whom Venus saw, and loved, and the love clung Like wasting fire her senses wild among.

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;- even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.

Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.

Beginning with maternal, fetal, and infant malnutrition, it’s hardly surprising that the enslaved were more susceptible than free people to most infirmities, including crib death, infant mortality of all kinds (including infanticide), death in childbirth, and injuries and deterioration to the mother from repeated childbirth, along with typhoid, cholera, smallpox, tetanus, worms, pellagra, scurvy, beriberi, kwashiorkor, rickets, diphtheria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dental-related ailments, dysentery, bloody flux, and other bowel complaints. The health conditions of the enslaved were aggravated by overwork, accidents, and work-related illnesses such as “green tobacco sickness,” today known as nicotine poisoning, which plagued tobacco workers.22 The heavy work regimes they endured wore down their bodies and aged them prematurely, with childbirth-related fatalities limiting women’s life spans even more than the men’s.

His message delivered, Gabriel departed, leaving the chosen Virgin of Nazareth to ponder over her wondrous experience. Mary's promised Son was to be "The Only Begotten" of the Father in the flesh; so it had been both positively and abundantly predicted. True, the event was unprecedented; true also it has never been paralleled; but that the virgin birth would be unique was as truly essential to the fulfilment of prophecy as that it should occur at all. That Child to be born of Mary was begotten of Elohim, the Eternal Father, not in violation of natural law but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof; and, the offspring from that association of supreme sanctity, celestial Sireship, and pure though mortal maternity, was of right to be called the "Son of the Highest." In His nature would be combined the powers of Godhood with the capacity and possibilities of mortality; and this through the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity, declared of God, demonstrated by science, and admitted by philosophy, that living beings shall propagate—after their kind. The Child Jesus was to inherit the physical, mental, and spiritual traits, tendencies, and powers that characterized His parents—one immortal and glorified—God, the other human—woman.

The World Health Organization estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years. Child mortality has plunged, longevity has increased, but childbirth remains almost as deadly as ever, with one maternal death every minute. Some 99 percent of these deaths occur in poor countries.

Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn’t economic but ethical. What was horrifying about Prudence’s death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.

If WHO statistics were to be believed, the U.S. had the worst maternal mortality in the industrialized world.

In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.” ​— ​MAYA ANGELOU AUTHOR NOTE Please be aware that this story involves sensitive topics such as rape (off-page, no graphic description and not between the couple), maternal mortality, grief, nightmares, emotional and reproductive abuse (not between the couple) and a brief mention of suicide ideation.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking, sexual violence, and the routine daily discrimination that causes girls to die at far higher rates than boys. The tools to address these challenges include girls’ education, family planning, micro-finance, and “empowerment” in every sense.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking,

Many studies revealed startling truths about technology, such as that routine use of electronic fetal monitoring on every birthing woman does not lower the perinatal mortality rate, but sharply increases the rate of C-sections.

Lack of health insurance is one factor contributing to poorer health, especially among the poor. Life expectancy in the United States is 78 years, lower than Japan’s 83 years, or Australia’s or Israel’s 82 years. According to the World Bank, in 2009 the United States ranked fortieth overall, just below Cuba.54 Infant and maternal mortality in the United States is little better than in some developing countries; for infant mortality, it is worse than Cuba, Belarus, and Malaysia, to name a few.55 And these poor health indicators are largely a reflection of the dismal statistics for America’s poor. For instance, America’s poor have a life expectancy that is almost 10 percent lower than that of those at the top.56 We

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men. Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like. The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength. But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself. The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty. But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America. Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others. What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression. Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally: The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.

One target of the fifth UN Millennium Development Goal (UNMDG) to improve maternal health, is to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015.

between 1915 and 1930, US maternal mortality did not decline and deaths of babies from birth injuries actually increased. Hospitals advertised widely, urging mothers to ‘go for the best’, and women believed they were getting just that when they paid the high fees.

Before issuing from the maternal womb the Lord revealed to the blessed child the hour in which he was to commence his mortal career among men. The

I believe she is Selene, goddess of the moon." "She looks so content." "You sound surprised." "Well," Callie said tentatively, "Selene is not the happiest of stories. After all, she is doomed to love a mortal in eternal sleep." St. John turned at her words, obviously impressed. "Her own fault. She should have known better than to ask favors of Zeus. That particular course of action never ends well." "A truth of which Selene was likely acutely aware upon receiving her favor. I assume that this statue depicts a happy Selene before Zeus meddled." "You forget," St. John said, a teasing gleam in his eye, "she and Endymion did have twenty children despite his somnolence, so she couldn't have been so very unhappy with her situation." "With due respect, my lord," Callie said, "bearing and raising twenty children alone does not sound like the happiest of circumstances. I hardly think she would appear so very rested were this a statue depicting her maternal bliss.

The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why? For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the “pro-life” mantle. If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States?

Men with mortal wounds did not worry him like a woman in labor.

children who go through at least six adverse childhood experiences could see their life expectancy reduced by more than twenty years. Physiological stress leads to hypertension, which results in higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, among other conditions. Research has even

Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use — whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration — a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality). Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited. Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and Beauvoir as biological feudalism.

Rydahl et al (2019) also set out to look more thoughtfully at which studies should be included in a meta-analysis. They focused on recent studies (within the past 20 years) which compared healthy (or low risk) women having induction at 41 and 42 weeks. Again, they found no difference in perinatal mortality, morbidity and caesarean section rates. “Induction prior to post-term was associated with few beneficial outcomes and several adverse outcomes. This draws attention to possible iatrogenic effects affecting large numbers of low-risk women in contemporary maternity care. According to the World Health Organization, expected benefits from a medical intervention must outweigh potential harms. Hence, our results do not support the widespread use of routine induction prior to post-term (41+0–6 gestational weeks).” (Rydahl et al 2019: 170).

But, in my opinion, the most horrifying part of Anna’s experience isn’t what happens to her physically, but how the people around her react: how her doctors dismiss and ignore her, expecting her to suffer through her pain for the good of her baby without any concern for whether her body can handle it; how her husband assumes she’s either making up or exaggerating her symptoms. I’m afraid I didn’t have to exaggerate these reactions at all. They’re all too real. The tendency to assume that women can’t be trusted to accurately convey their symptoms comes from the historical diagnosis of “hysteria,” which was once thought to be a medical condition said to only affect women. Doctors were taught that women were inherently liars, unreliable, or hysterical hypochondriacs. In some cases, they were even believed to be possessed. And these beliefs have persisted, even after the diagnosis of hysteria was proven to be nonsense. To this day doctors prescribe less pain medication to women than they do to men, they take longer to diagnose us with illness, and they’re more likely to send us home in the middle of a medical emergency like a heart attack. Unfortunately, all these prejudices disproportionately affect women of color. If you’re ever curious about why the maternal mortality rate in the United States is so high—particularly among Black women—these are good places to start. Doctors don’t understand our bodies, they don’t believe us about our symptoms, and they ignore us when we try to tell them we’re in pain.

around abortion instituted by antichoice governors, high rates of cesarean sections and maternal mortality, and prohibitive healthcare costs—doulas are providing crucial support to pregnant clients and medical staff alike.

En otro nivel, sin embargo, el cuento de Deméter y Perséfone puede verse como la representación de todo el ciclo de la vida. Deméter y Perséfone son madre y doncella, dos etapas de la vida de una mujer. Deméter adopta la apariencia de una anciana, una que según el himno homérico ya no está en edad de procrear o de los “dones de Afrodita”[18], lo que completa el ciclo de doncella a madre a anciana; el ciclo al que se hace referencia repetidamente en los relatos preclásicos de la diosa. Incluso en su apariencia de anciana, el elemento maternal de Deméter es aparente, si bien la naturaleza de esa característica está en marcado contraste con la de la mortal Metanira. Las participaciones de Gaia y Rea son recordatorios de que la diosa es la fuente de la vida y la muerte. En Eleusis, lo que era la sagrada unidad de la diosa única se convierte en la dualidad de Deméter y Kore (Perséfone), como era el caso en la antigua Creta. El mito no se trata simplemente de la ruptura del ciclo inmortal; se trata de la confrontación con la muerte, y este aspecto es el más pronunciado en los ritos eleusinos.

Maternal mortality and C-section rates were on the rise and people were speaking up.

Right in the middle of a pregnancy, Ebonie had left the country’s safest state for expectant mothers—where the mortality rate looked more like that of France or Germany—for one of its most dangerous. Her new home state, Texas, had the same maternal mortality rate as Mongolia.

In 1847 Semmelweis therefore persuaded colleagues, midwives, and students to cleanse their hands with a chlorine solution before entering the maternity ward. The results were immediate and impressive as mortality plunged to 1.3 percent in both sections. Semmelweis

We say in America that we love motherhood, but that's a cruel joke. A woman is about twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth in America as in Britain--because the British make a real effort to save moms' lives, and we don't. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate actually began rising again in the United States around the year 2000, even as it was falling in the rest of the world. Today one of the most dangerous places in the advanced world to become pregnant is the American South, where women die in childbirth at far higher rates than, say, Spain or Sweden.

US hospitals may be excellent, but there must be something profoundly wrong with our health care system if we fall near the bottom of the heap among developed nations on life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, self-reported health, obesity, drug overdoses, suicide, homicides, disability rates, traffic deaths, almost any indicator you can think of. Lack of access to medical care deserves much of the blame, but even educated, insured, well-off Americans are less healthy than their peers in other rich nations

The World Economic Forum, which tracks performance on gender equality measures in 134 countries, reports a clear correlation between progress in gender and GDP per capita. And a recent study found that Fortune 500 companies with the highest number of women on their boards were 53-percent more profitable than those with the fewest women board members. Where women have access to secondary education, good jobs, land and other assets, national growth and stability are enhanced, and we see lower maternal mortality, improved child nutrition, greater food security and less risk of HIV and AIDS.

The share of the world population that survives on fewer than 2,000 calories a day has dropped from 51% in 1965 to 3% in 2005.13 More than 2.1 billion people finally got access to clean drinking water between 1990 and 2012. In the same period, the number of children with stunted growth went down by a third, child mortality fell an incredible 41%, and maternal deaths were cut in half.

A figure who was much reviled in his own time but whose speculations and medical practice also paved the way for the germ theory was the Hungarian gynecologist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818–1865). In the 1840s, working at the Vienna General Hospital, Semmelweis was appalled by the rate of maternal mortality from puerperal fever, now known to be a severe bacterial blood infection and then the leading cause of death in lying-in hospitals.

The United States spends more on health care than any other advanced economy, but we don't see better outcomes in exchange. Incredibly, in many parts of the country, life expectancy is actually shrinking, and when it comes to maternal mortality, the United States is one of only thirteen countries where rates have gotten worse over the past twenty-five years. Meanwhile, working families are overwhelmed by medical bills, which are one of America's leading causes of personal bankruptcy.

The low value of the female in the society was also reflected in the widespread practices of infanticide and abandonment of female babies.41 It was very common to raise only one daughter per family, which, together with maternal mortality, contributed to a shortage of women during the Roman Empire that created a population crisis. Therefore, when Paul gives honor and recognition to so many female members of the Roman church in Romans 16, it stands out as a significant deviation from the cultural practice and ideal.

Our world is bleeding girls and women, literally. A 2007 UNFPA report estimated that there are 163 million missing women that should be here: they are missing because of egregious maternal mortality rates, sex selection, abnormally high suicide rates, excess childhood mortality, and violence against women. Lack of bodily integrity and physical security for women is the first and foremost would that must be addressed by humankind.

The scroll slowed on a post from Madison. Predictably, she was sharing more pregnancy content. Today's post was a column graph about maternal mortality rates, accompanied by the caption: This makes me so sad. Growing a human is hard enough. We shouldn't have to fear for our lives on top of that. Mae frowned. The graph was cut off. It showed rates for All, White, and Hispanic, but there was a sliver of what looked like another bar on the far right. Under it, the only part of the word that didn't get cut off was Bl. Ordinarily, Mae wouldn't have wasted any time on this. It was just Madison being Madison, thinking of herself and no one else. But after learning about her grandma Doris's racist past yesterday, it was hard to look past anything about the Parkers anymore. A reverse-image search turned up the original article, titled Black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The full graph showed that the column for Black women towered over the other columns Madison had posted. Anger and annoyance rising within her, Mae returned to Madison's post and started typing. You'll be fine. If you'd read the article and shared the full graph, you'd know the point of the piece is that Black women are way more at risk. Or do you not care about that?

Louisiana, where I had spent so much time reporting on maternal and infant mortality, had become the first state to release data by race, and the numbers showed a vastly unequal distribution in deaths. While African Americans were 32 percent of the population, they made up 70 percent of the dead.

On average, the risk of death during pregnancy is 58 times greater than the risk of dying from a legal abortion. Given these statistics, there can be no "pro-life" stance about abortion that is not hypocritical unless the life of the pregnant person is inconsequential. It is always safer to have an abortion than to be pregnant even in countries with lower maternal mortality.